I am not a scientist, but I do try to listen to
scientists. When they make Genesis seem a sober account of how the universe
began, I lose the Victorian idea of science as certainty, religion as
speculation.

Take this paper as a start. It is fairly
insubstantial, and can be scrunched up and made into a small lump - but wait
till you have finished this article to do so. Paper consists of atoms and
molecules which contain tiny electric charges, plus an awful lot of nothing at
all. All matter is like this, so that if you now throw in the chair you are
sitting in, plus yourself, the scrunched result would be invisible to the naked
eye.

Now comes a more difficult bit. Throw in the furnishings of your house, the house itself,
the road outside, the whole town, the county, the country, the world itself, and
your lump will still not be big enough to see. Have courage, because if you then
proceed to throw in the planets, the stars, and the galaxies you will find the
task becoming easier: so much stuff exerts a colossal force of gravity and pulls
things together. In the end you will just about begin to see it all as the size
of a pinhead. That, at least, is what I understand scientists to be saying.

Apparently, in what we may like Genesis call the
beginning, a tiny lump like this exploded outwards, driving everything at an
immense speed.

Everything is still galloping outwards accordingly,
as can be seen through a telescope.

Now I am going to quote words written by the Lady
Julian of Norwich five hundred years ago, and spotted by Alec Guinness who
quotes them in his book Blessings in Disguise: 'Our Lord...showed me a
little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as
round as a ball. I thought there upon with the eye of my understanding, and
thought, what may this be? And it was generally answered thus: It is all that is
made.'